Bernard Frize

Date of birth : 1954

Country : France

Born in Saint-Mandé, France

When he made a name for himself in the late 1970s with his small All Over canvasses, based on the simple principle of covering the entire surface, Bernard Frize demonstrated his desire to shake up the canons of painting. Rejecting the sacrosanct notions of style and the artist demigod, he sometimes involved assistants in his artistic production to add confusion or changed his date and place of birth in different exhibition catalogues so as to bring the focus solely on the mechanics of painting. “Let the brush paint,” is the credo of this purist who seeks to drive painterly practices into a corner and only show the physical act of painting. To “create the conditions for chance”—organized spontaneity, in his opinion, being indissociable from the creative process —Bernard Frize sets up a series of technical constraints that lead him to these semiguided, semi-random forms, which are not lacking in humour. Take, for example, the time he painted an (apparently) abstract series of circles which actually depicted… a Mexican cooking fried eggs!